YACA: Yet Another Chat Application

YACA is yet another chat application aiming to cover the project requirements: Dynamic discovery, leader election, reliable ordered multicast, and Byzantine fault tolerance.

YACA uses the client-server architecture to enable clients to participate in one global chat room, where clients are able to respond to previous messages (i.e. the happened-before relation is respected). In general, our strategy is to utilize powerful building blocks like total-ordered reliable multicast, view-synchronous group communication, and the (Max-)Phase-King Algorithm to realize this project in a Byzantine fault-tolerant manner.

Configuration

Adjust the configuration to fit your purposes. Most likely, you will have to modify the initial view by setting the "ip_addr" to your own. Afterwards, run

$ python generate_initial.py

to generate the initial view.

Run

To run YACA, start by spawning the initial servers (as configured above):

$ python launch.py -i

By removing the -i option, you can also start server instances on another device in your local network.

Afterwards, you can launch multiple clients by running:

$ python client.py

Documentation

Theoretical background can be found here. See Appendix A, for a detailed description of the proposed Max-Phase-King algorithm.

License

This project is distributed under the MIT license. Please see LICENSE file.